University of Edinburgh's
Festival Speech Synthesis Systems is a free
software multi-lingual speech synthesis workbench that runs on
multiple-platforms offering black box text to speech, as well as
an open architecture for research in speech synthesis. It
designed as a component of large speech technology systems.

This site is the main US mirror.

The distribution here includes source for the Edinburgh Speech Tools
Library and Festival itself. 15 Voices are also provided for US English,
other voices are available elsehwere on this site and instructions to
build new voices are given
here.

Although we agressively attempt to run Festival on all platforms
we can get access to it is not always the case that it works
out of the box. The hardest requirement is probably having a working
and compatible audio system, simple as audio is supposed to be in
our experience we find a wide range of standards.
We do give pointers for dealing with
audio systems we don't yet support, and offer and external playing
mechainsm so if you have any programs that can play sound Festival can
usually use that.

Festival is primarily designed as a component of a larger speech
applicationm hence we provide a number of APIs. It can be used
to simply synthesize text files but to people who think command
line interfaces are quaint you might find this not what you are
looking for.

The system was (and still is) primarily developed under Unix (Linux,
FreeBSD and Solaris) because the authors are by far most familar with
these. However the system has been ported to Windows and is used
in a number of real applications on that platform. Although there
is full support for Windows we do not yet feel it is as mature or
stable the versions under Unix.

The system is written in C++ which means with every new version of
of each vendor's C++ compiler that is released our system probably
wont compile without minor changes. We try to keep up with new
versions as quickly as we can, and make patches or instructions
available for new versions as soon as we can.